A growing body of academic research points to a significant correlation between the outcome of voice conversations and the compatibility, similarity, and social identification of the participating voices.i With over 2.4 million non-retail inside sales representatives in the United States (U.S.) alone, millions of sales phone conversations are made on a daily basis,ii yet only rudimentary automated coordination of sales representatives with customers is performed. For example, current call coordination technologies that coordinate calls between sales representatives and customers are typically based on representatives' experience and perceived complexity of the customer's case, or based on a geographical location of a customer and sales representatives. This is mainly due to the fact that sales conversations are left largely unanalyzed in any automatic way, rendering their content inaccessible to modeling, and precluding the ability to insightfully coordinate customers with specific representatives. iIbister, Lifelike Computer Character Conference, 1995; Tusing and Dillard, Human Communication Research 26, 2000; Nass and Brave, Wired for Speech, 2007iiInsidesales.com “Market size 2013” study
Recent advances in “automatic speech recognition” (ASR) technologies, and specifically in “large vocabulary continuous speech recognition” (LVCSR), are for the first time enabling high-accuracy automatic transcription of conversations. At the same time, natural language processing (NLP) approaches to both topic modeling and world-knowledge modeling, have become much more efficient due to the availability of large, freely accessible natural language corpora (e.g., CommonCrawl), as well as freely available ontologies or “knowledge graphs” (e.g., DBpedia). Finally, recent research on affect identification applying machine learning (ML) has been able to successfully model subjective aspects of emotion and personality traits as perceived by listeners. However, the current call coordination technologies fail to exploit these technologies for efficient coordination of calls between sales representatives and customers.